Devalkar, Sripad

Professor Sripad Devalkar’s research interests include problems at the interface of Operations and Finance, Risk Management, and Supply Chain Management. Among other projects, he is working (with various colleagues) on the optimisation of operational and financial trading strategies for firms in the commodity processing business; use of procurement service providers and the optimal level of delegation of decisions to these service providers in global supply chains; and the role of intermediaries in reducing risk and sourcing funds for development projects. He teaches the core Operations Management class for the PGP programme at the ISB, as well as an elective course on Global Operations Management.

Ph D (Operations and Management Science), Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Published Papers

Devalkar, Sripad K.,Sohoni, Milind G.,Arora, Priyank. (Forthcoming) "Ex-post funding: How should a resource constrained non-profit organization allocate its funds?", Production and Operations ManagementRead Abstract >Close >We study the funds allocation problem for a resource-constrained non-profit organization (NPO) that implements social development projects for public good. In addition to raising funds from donors who contribute prior to project implementation (``traditional donors''), the NPO uses a novel approach, which we term as the ``ex-post funding'' approach, to also raise funds from donors who contribute based on the results delivered by the NPO (``ex-post donors''). In this approach, the NPO uses its initial funds to implement early phases of the project, creates ``results-certificates'' from the completed phases, and invites ex-post donors to purchase these certificates. The donations raised from selling the results-certificates are used to recover the NPO's own funds used in the project implementation. Operationalizing this approach is complicated when the project must incur a large fixed cost before any benefits are delivered by the project and the total benefit delivered is time sensitive. We show that for a given amount of initial funds available, there exists a threshold amount of funds that the NPO should raise from traditional donors before implementing the project phases so as to maximize the total expected benefit delivered. Through numerical studies, we analyze how the threshold of funds raised from traditional donors and the total benefit delivered vary with donor characteristics such as donor willingness to give and the proportion of donors who contribute prior to project implementation. Our numerical studies suggest that even with relatively small amount of initial funds, the NPO can deliver substantially higher benefit by using the ex-post funding approach when compared to using a traditional approach that requires the NPO to raise all the funds required upfront.